Young King Penguins are big and brown. Photo by Paul Carroll on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
Scientists had so much money they were able to follow 17,000 penguins for, wow, 24 years. They discovered they were breeding 19 days earlier now than they were then. It all sounds rather dramatic — with penguins “bringing forward their mating cycles” in an “unbelievably big change”.
It’s like penguins have been forced into teenage pregnancy or something.
Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash
But then there’s the quiet line slipped in there: “….with greater success rates for chick survival.” which seems rather important, or perhaps, even the whole point? Is there any better marker to measure penguin health and happiness than seeing their baby penguins frolic? There can’t be too many penguins who enjoy watching the babies die?
So the ABC writes the catchy headline:
“King penguins successfully changing breeding habits in face of climate change”
But they could have said:
“Climate change saves baby penguins”
And we all know why they didn’t.
Their first line lays it on thick:
Climate change is putting pressure on many animals and their food chains at the extremes of our planet.
In ABC training school perhaps they learnt that 2001 was the perfect year for penguins, and thus that somehow their behaviour is being pushed far out of past norms. Except of course, that the past norms are what’s wild, and the penguins have been making baby penguins in much colder and hotter times for thousands of years.
It’s quite likely that penguins haven’t brought their breeding cycle forward — they’ve just restored it to what it was before.
They’ve somehow survived a thousand cycles of warming and cooling. This is just the last 10,000 years.
REFERENCE
Bardon et al (2026) Multiannual environmental forcing shapes breeding phenology and success in a sub-Antarctic seabird, Science Advances, 11 Mar 2026 Vol 12, Issue 11